The Global Great War: India, China, Japan, 1914-1918

This is part of a series on the Global Great War which I will have wrapped up by the end of 1919. In this post, I cover India, China, and Japan from 1914-1918 - I’ll probably add shorter entries for Turkey, British South Africa, French West Africa, and Persia in another entry before we get to 1919. I also want a more dedicated discussion of the colonial soldiers, but I think that will make more sense in a forthcoming update on the state of the armies.

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The Global Great War: India, China, Japan, 1914-1918.​

Overview

When most laymen think of the great war, images are conjured up of the trenches in France, the frigid campaigns in the Alps, and the brutal fighting in East Prussia, Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus. For some time, the sheer scale of the land battles in Europe have obscured the other theaters of the war, which have been treated as secondary to the main conflict. The dominance of the European front in historical memory can be explained at least partially by the much larger numbers of men and materiel dedicated to it. Unable to project its naval power, Germany could not meaningfully challenge Britain’s hold over its colonial empire.

Yet the conventional, eurocentric understanding of the war frequently obscures more than it explains. In particular, it tends to occlude the fact that the Great War was understood by most of its participants as a conflict of two imperial blocs for control of colonies and global resources. German, Italian, and British elites all conceived of the war in this way. The German drive to build an eastern empire was at least in part a reaction to their frustrated global ambitions, which were thwarted by British naval power.

However, the most crucial flaw in the standard account of the war is its failure to fully reckon with its role in transforming the politics of the global periphery. By “global periphery”, we mean both nations that were subject to direct colonial rule, such as India, Madagascar, and Indochina, and nominally independent semi-colonies exploited by global imperialism, such as China, Malaysia, Turkey, and Iran. The Great War forced the imperial powers to extract more wealth, manpower, and resources from their colonies while simultaneously weakening their relative power, setting off the growth of anti-imperialist, national liberation movements of a predominantly social-patriotic character. Though few of them had the same success as the European proletarian revolts of the First Era of Revolution (1917-1924), the unprecedented political mobilization in the global periphery laid the groundwork for the more victorious campaigns of the Second Revolutionary Period.

China and Japan

As the only industrialized imperialist power of the non-white world, Japan occupied a unique position within global capitalism. In East Asia, it had long been interested in carving out its own imperial domain, and achieved some success with the conquest and incorporation of Taiwan and Korea. Besides the limited size of its military forces and relatively low levels of wealth, the primary barriers to expansion were Britain and America, which both possessed daunting superiorities of industrial power and an interest in restraining Japanese strength in the Indo-Pacific. For some time, Japan had acted as Britain’s catspaw against Russia, and its attempts to carve out economic concessions in Manchuria had consequently been begrudgingly tolerated by its European financier. America took a more consistently hostile line, and treated Japanese incursion into China as a threat to its “open-door” policy. The Honolulu Accords lowered the temperature somewhat, but also stoked British fears of Japanese-American dominance in the Pacific.

Distrustful of Japanese intentions, the British rebuffed an offer by the Japanese to track down and engage Germany’s East Asia Squadron at the beginning of the war. Japan hoped to use the conflict between European powers to enlarge its colonial domain, and the British refusal stung harshly. A month later, in September, Japan issued an ultimatum to Germany to turn over Qingdao and its South Pacific islands or face a declaration of war. Shortly thereafter, Japan declared war on Germany and began the siege of Qingdao (1).

Within a year, Japan occupied all of Germany’s South Pacific possessions, as well as Qingdao. After seizing the German concession, Japanese troops marched far inland into Shandong, taking control of the crucial Jinan-Qingdao railway line. Seeing little other option, Britain began to tentatively cooperate with Japan as an alliance partner. Then, in March, the Japanese foreign minister Hioki Eki delivered a list of twenty demands to Chinese President Yuan Shikai. Acceptance of them would have turned China into a de facto protectorate of Japan. Britain quickly rebuked the measure, and in a rare success of Anglo-American wartime diplomacy, convinced Bryan to present a unified front to the Japanese. Japan was forced to walk back the demands in Groups 4 and 5, which in practice meant that it gained little more than it already de facto possessed. The sudden Anglo-American cooperation bitterly reminded Japanese elites of the “Triple Intervention” of 1914, in which Russia, Germany, and France forced Japan to revise the harsh terms it imposed on China at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War. Once again, Japan felt that it was subjected to a different standard than the western powers (2).

Nonetheless, the demands formalized the loss of Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria and Shandong, leading to public protests that weakened Chinese President Yuan Shikai’s already fragile government. China had thus far stayed out of the war, hoping that neutrality would be sufficient to stop a Japanese incursion from Qinghao deeper into the Shandong peninsula. Although Pro-German sentiment was widespread among the Chinese literary class, most believed that fighting a land war with Russia and Japan simultaneously would be an act of national suicide.

Following the issuing of the 20 demands, Britain contemplated a scheme for China to join the war on the side of the Entente. This would give them a seat at the table at a future peace conference, restrain Japanese expansionism, and provide China a pretense to build up an army that could act as a counterweight to Japan’s ambitions. These plans were opposed by Japan, which threatened to make a separate peace if China joined the war as an Entente power. Then, in August, the Bryan administration approved a new issue of low interest loans to China which helped stabilize the government and finance the creation of an army. Without providing any explicit guarantee of Chinese territory, secretary of state Andrew Carnegie privately assured Beijing that America’s interest was in the stability and integrity of the Chinese state. This substantially reduced the Chinese interest in joining the war, though it did sour American-Japanese relations, ending the ambiguity about Japan’s foreign policy direction and placing it more firmly in the British camp (3).

For the next few years, Anglo-Japanese relations slowly recovered. In 1916, Japan joined the Treaty of London, committing itself to not signing a separate peace. The onset of the u-boat campaign in late 1917 sharply increased British dependency on Japanese naval power; at one point, more than twenty Japanese destroyers were present in the Mediterranean on convoy escort duty. Japan used its leverage to pressure Britain into the Portsmouth Agreement, in which it agreed that Qingdao would remain under Japanese control, sparking anti-british and anti-japanese riots in China (4).

At the time, the Chinese government was beginning to recover from several years of crisis. In 1916, Yuan Shikai attempted to declare himself monarch, but soon discovered he did not have the support of many of his own generals. In a short “national protection war”, the loyal Beiyang army of Duan Qirui won several victories against the rebels, concentrated overwhelmingly in the south, but then retreated after the front in Yunnan deteriorated into a stalemate. In the wake of the retreat, Sun Yatsen declared a rival nationalist government in Guangzhou. Shortly after returning to Beiyang, Qirui overthrew the government of Shikai and declared an end to the experiment in monarchy. More American loans allowed him to build up his army once again, after which he proceeded to successfully topple Sun Yat-sen’s constitutional protection government in the Southern Pacification War. This time, a military governor was appointed and the KMT driven back into the mountainous terrain of Yunnan (5).

Qirui’s military dictatorship soon faced renewed warlordism in the outlying provinces. Nonetheless, his control over the center of the country was sufficiently secure to contemplate joining the Great War. With Russia knocked out, anti-british sentiment running rampant, and Italy looking liable to surrender, China began weighing its options for joining a war against Britain and Japan. Japanese accession to the Treaty of London scuttled the hopes of British neutrality in a Sino-Japanese war, but it seemed unlikely that Britain could contribute significant troops with its armies tied down in France and the Balkans. In August, secret talks began between China and Germany; the latter insisted that Qingdao be returned at the end of the war, but was willing to commit to ending Japanese privileges in Shandong and Manchuria if China joined the war. Even with these tantalizing rewards on offer, China was hardly in a place to fight Japan in a conventional military conflict, and Germany had little real assistance it could offer so long as it was blockaded by Britain. Consequently, Qurui resisted calls to join the war from the nationalist “June 10th” movement (named after the day the Portsmouth agreements were signed), and China remained neutral throughout 1918 despite growing tensions with Japan.

Throughout the course of Bryan’s presidency, Sino-American relations steadily warmed. Clause 3 of the Trenton Resolution, prohibiting exploitative and neo-imperial trade practices, was aimed specifically at the unequal treaties. In August 1918, Duan Qirui traveled to America for a state dinner, where Bryan announced funding for a new iron and steel works complex in Shanxi. With the domestic economy sluggish and financiers increasingly hesitant about extending further loans to Britain and France, capital began migrating to Chinese markets. The Treaty of Washington formalized this state of affairs, giving American investors de facto privileged access in return for lowered American tariffs on Chinese goods. Britain and Japan could only look on with concern and consternation at these developments (6).

In Japan, a debate was raging in military circles about the next step in the war. Fears circulated that Duan Qurui was on the verge of building a strong, centralized state in China that could resist Japanese encroachment. While this was largely a fiction disproved by his tenuous control of over half of China’s provinces, the steady growth of the disciplined and loyal Beiyang Army would make it much more costly for Japan to impose further concessions on China. There were other figures, principally civilian politicians, naval officials, and domestic reformers, who opposed a preemptive war. They argued that Britain would not support Japan in such an endeavor, and that it would likely harm its international prestige. It would also make it impossible for Japan to engage in a proposed pro-white Siberian expedition, and likely weaken its position at a peace conference.

The force of these arguments steadily wilted as the war effort of the Entente faltered. By the time Italy surrendered, most military leaders in Japan concluded that Britain and France would lose the war. And yet, British naval power meant that Japan could ill afford to alienate Britain and America, something which an incursion further into China would likely accomplish. Before the army could launch any fait accompli , the Haro Takashi government came to power, which quickly acted to restrain military adventurism. Takashi sent the Foreign Minister Uchida Kosai to the United States to negotiate a solution to the “Chinese Problem”. The Japanese wanted recognition of the entirety of China as an area of “Special interest” to Japan, permanent limits on Chinese troop numbers, and the right to inspect and monitor the Chinese military. Bryan was willing to concede the former two demands if Japan in turn committed to not seek any further economic concessions in China. Uchida knew that such a proposal would be unacceptable to the Japanese military, which still viewed the war as an opportunity to expand its influence on the mainland.

The failure of negotiations with the Americans led the Japanese to Britain and Bonar Law’s conservatives. Britain had been nearly as concerned with the expansion of the Chinese Army as Japan, and proved surprisingly receptive to Uchida’s proposals. While they would not tolerate a Chinese protectorate over all of Japan, they were amenable to the notion of troop restrictions, so long as “peacekeeping powers” were shared between the two nations. The secret agreement reached on September 1918 gave British permission to a second Sino-Japanese war, so long as future economic concessions were kept to a line north of Shanghai, in the Jiansu, Shandong, Hebei, and Shanxi provinces. The matter of the Siberian intervention was no longer of real concern for Britain, which had given up on the prospect of reopening the Eastern front after the continued failure of white offensives. Of course, Britain would not join Japan in such a war, but it would do all it could to act as a friendly neutral. The subject of what might happen in the event that China formally joined the Central Powers was never discussed.

India

The jewel of Britain’s empire contributed more to the war than many independent nations. Over 1 million soldiers fought outside the subcontinent, and over one million more worked overseas in critical war industries. In all, more than 2.4 million Indians served abroad, with the number actively fighting or working overseas increasing exponentially toward the end of the war. This enormous mobilization was only possible with the consent of the native Indian elite, who sincerely believed that the war was an opportunity to win the right of home-rule. It was thought that once Indian soldiers distinguished themselves fighting for the Empire, England would reward India with greater autonomy and rectify the humiliating conditions imposed on even educated Indians, who were treated as racial inferiors and second-class citizens. The repeated frustration of these aspirations would go a long way toward creating a unified Indian nation (7).

At the beginning of the war, the Indian National Congress was the primary site of native political self-organization in India. This institution was historically dominated by educated reformers and lacked a mass support base. Like the Irish Parliamentary Party, it was disposed to work within the imperial system to secure greater autonomy. An upswing of radicalism in the 1900s led to several confrontations between the moderate majority and radical leaders, who included Bal Gagandhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, and Bipin Chandra Pal. They were not able to win control over the Congress, and each was eventually either arrested or deported to outlying provinces, weakening the radical faction.

The half-decade of war placed tremendous stresses on both ordinary Indians and the Indian bureaucracy. India was forced to pay for the entire cost of its army, which required sharp tax hikes to counteract domestic inflation. The standard of living for those who lived in the areas under most direct British control suffered the most; this is where the colonial administration was most efficient at collecting taxes, and these were also the areas where domestic populations were most dependent on European civilian goods which became unavailable during the war.

The protest movements of the war’s early years originated from outside of the INC. Germany, Turkey, and the radical Indian-Nationalist Ghadar Party organized a mutiny in mid-1915 which was only foiled by the extensive British intelligence network. The harsh repression that followed contributed to the rise of Tilak’s home-rule leagues. Recently returned from exile in Mandalay, Tilak began organizing a mass protest movement to press for a formal commitment to Indian home rule. After Austen Chamberlain, the archconservative secretary of state for India, made several public comments which needlessly inflamed the protests, he was replaced by the somewhat more moderate Arthur Balfour. Hoping to mollify the protestors, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, proclaiming that India would be given “The chance to exercise an increased degree of self-government befitting its status as a great civilization.” The ambiguity of the statement and its lack of a clear timetable quickly came in for criticism from many in the home-league movement, but it did temporarily slow the growth of protest and reassure many wavering moderates in the INC (8).

To many Indians, the following years demonstrated the duplicity of Balfour’s promise. Living standards continued to deteriorate, and returning soldiers complained of ill treatment, racism, and miserable front conditions. Following the introduction of the draft in 1916, Britain faced chronic manpower shortages which it could only make up with colonial labor and soldiers. In late 1917 and 1918, there was a sharp hike in military conscription and an increased use of coercive means of labor mobilization; the presence of “penal provisions” to enforce labor contracts was condemned forcefully in a 1917 INC memorandum. There was also the issue of preserving Indian labor for Indian economic development. Ambica Charan Mazumdar, the moderate leader of the INC, demanded that emigration controls be instituted to halt the “Evacuation of skilled Indian workers”. Yet this process only accelerated as Britain’s factories were emptied to feed its conscript army. The social dislocation and economic disruption caused by the loss of labor contributed greatly to the rise of the INC’s radical faction (9).

In 1918, the INC moderates hoped that a liberal-labor government would come to power in England to forge a compromise peace and set India on the path to home rule. Instead, a Tory landslide occurred, and with it, a new slate of harsh wartime laws suppressing dissent. With fears brewing of a second Ghadar mutiny, the leaders of the INC’s radical faction were once again arrested, sparking protests in Bengal and Punjab that were bloodily suppressed in the so-called “May Massacres”. This was the final straw for the moderate faction of the INC, who called an emergency meeting in which they endorsed the principles of the Trenton Resolution and called for India to be accorded self-rule and dominion status within the next five years, with “power over finance and the maintenance of domestic order” to be devolved in the next year. Motilal Nehru, a home-rule radical but not a republican, was elected the new president. Without calling for a complete break from Britain, he demanded that India be considered a ""progressive and autonomous nation with coequal rights amongst the other peoples of the earth” (10).

Yet for all of its newfound radicalism, the INC still had only a tenuous connection to the broad masses. Only Mahatma Ghandhi, one of the newly radicalized moderates, had anything approaching the following of Tilak. He organized a movement of mass noncooperation that eventually led to his arrest and imprisonment in late 1918. His failure to coordinate with the burgeoning and well-funded Ghadar movement was one of the key missteps in the campaign for home rule.

It would soon be corrected. Unbeknownst to most of the INC, the radical Lala Lajpat Rai had recently been smuggled back into India from his self-imposed exile in America; with the assistance of the German Embassy in San Francisco, compliant American officials, and local Indian independence activists, he boarded an ocean steamer to Calcutta under a false identity and disembarked without issue with several million pounds in his briefcase. Thereafter, he established links with the most prominent militants of both the Ghadar Party and the non-cooperation movement. The events which followed in the wake of his arrival would send reverberations that echoed far beyond British India.

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Footnotes ​

1. This is somewhat different from the course of events IOTL, where Britain requested that Japan protect British merchant shipping; with the Honolulu Accords, Anglo-Japanese relations have frayed somewhat, which means Japan makes the initial offer of assistance and is turned down. Seeing an opportunity to seize the German colonies, Japan declares war anyways, but is not technically an “entente power” until later in the war (unlike IOTL).

2. The seizure of the Jinan-Qingdao railway parallels events IOTL, with the difference that the action appears even more brazen to international observers since its a solely Japanese operation, rather than a Japanese-British one as IOTL. The “twenty demands” mirror the “twenty one” of OTL, though the scale of Anglo-American cooperation is a bit greater here; Britain’s worries about America’s position and the diplomacy that consequently occurs actually means that a more united front is presented here, despite better British-American relations IOTL. As a result, Japan has to walk back Group 4 of the demands as well as Group 5, leading to more Japanese resentment. (Group 4 state that no power besides Japan is permitted to acquire any additional concessions)

3. The scheme described in this paragraph did occur, as did the Japanese opposition to it. However, the Japanese opposition is somewhat more robust, as evidenced by the threat to make a separate peace. The events described later are unique to this timeline.

4. Japan also signed the Treaty of London IOTL, but did so a year earlier. Japan sends over twice as many destroyers to the Mediterranean ITTL because Britain is in much more desparate need of support without American assistance against the u-boat threat. As a result, Britain is even more dependent on Japan, which lets the latter wring more formal concessions from it before a peace conference.

5. These events involve the same characters as OTL, but follow a very different course. Butterflies from a slightly more stable Chinese government mean that Yuan Shikai attempts to declare himself monarch somewhat later; he now has the support of the Beiyang army of Duan Qirui, which means that he has much more success in the national protection war, even if no decisive victory is secured. As IOTL, though, Qirui and Shikai soon come to blows. Because of the relative success of the Beijing government in the national protection war, Qirui is able to raise another army and depose the KMT government in Guangzhou. In practice, this means China has a significantly stronger central state than in OTL and can act as more of a counterweight to Japan. Of course, this is speaking in relative terms; warlordism is still very much a problem.

6. All of this is completely novel to this timeline, and will have big downstream effects on the global economy and geopolitics.

7. ITTL, India faces significantly more social dislocation, impoverishment, inflation, and misery from the war. This is because Britain simply runs out of available manpower somewhere in early 1918 (because of its larger army and the lack of American reinforcements), and has to lean on the colonies and dominions to try to make it up; with the latter much more capable of refusing requests for increased troop mobilization, it is India that is forced to bear the brunt of the war. IOTL, around 1.2 million Indians served overseas, with around 550,000 engaged in combat operations; here, 2.4 million do, with a slightly higher share of laborers due to the needs of wartime industries and Britain’s effort to depend less on American imports.

8. Roughly similar to OTL, with the exception that the Ghadar mutiny is moderately larger due to an easier time accessing American funds and the home-rule protests a bit more vigorous because the conservatives ITTL mishandle matters more severely than OTL’s liberals.

9. These were matters that many INC members were frustrated with IOTL, but they did not become as politicized as they are here.

10. Most of this did not occur IOTL, but it parallels some events that occur later, from 1919-1920.